23 Responses

I see you drank the Koolaid that the rightists are passing out concerning FDR and the great depression. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of economists think differently.

Sure, those that got rich on the old way of doing things don’t want it to stop. I say let them lose all that wealth they stole from the people. They can’t steal the skills and knowledge of those “below” them that are the true source of all that wealth.

Sorry about your Koolaid, but you cannot argue with reality: thanks to FDR the US had unemployment twice the rate of Europe for many years.

And China has stolen all our technology.
As far as your second paragraph, what does that have to do with government policies for excess credit that created a classic bubble have to do with your Commie ravings about stealing from the people?
It was the ACOEN/Obama policies starting with Jimmy Carter creating CRA that forced banks to lend to unqualified lenders that started this whole mess of uncontrolled urban sprawl and oil dependency.

You are utterly delusional. Go ahead, check the literature for yourself and you’ll see, but I don’t think you’ll do that. I think if asked to produce sources, you’ll produce about three widely distributed on the web. Learn to use the other half of Google. Go to “more” and then “scholar” and see what you find. Or are you yet another American who scorned those who really investigate for themselves before they come to conclusions?

Your second paragraph is even more delusional. Guess what, those folks who bought during the Carter years are doing fine with their houses. It’s the folks Bush’s people lent to and then sold the mortgages off to high risk investors avoiding the consequences themselves, they thought. Let those high risk investors fall.

Dear Moron, yes anybody who took out a thirty year mortgage thirty four years ago is not failing on their mortgage today.

It is the CRA act that forces banks to lend to unqualified people.

Bush did not invent packaging bad mortgages and reselling them as government guaranteed securities – that was Bill Clinton after getting lobbied by young lawyer Obama when Obama visited Chris Dodd and Bill Clinton as lobbiest to increase the commissions that ACORN got paid for demonstrating in front of banks until they made loans to ACORN deadbeats.

So are the ones taken out during the Clinton years failing? Nope, it’s the ones taken out under Bush. Like most things in moderation, as Clinton did them they worked, taken to the Bush extremem they didn’t.

You already said that, complete with the unwarranted namecalling. (Since I have a Ph.D., it doesn’t intimidate me in the least.) Folks who took out mortgages under Clinton were not 30 years ago, yet it’s not that group that are defaulting, it’s those really severly unqualified folks that Bush’s people gave highly inflated value mortgages to that are defaulting. (As I said before.) Try to show me evidence otherwise if you can.

I repeated that about your faulty answer to my criticism of Carter, in which you said that people who took out mortgages under Carter arer not defaulting, which is, was and will always be a moronic answer. That you claim a PhD is not surprising – you should get a refund from your schools, undergraduate and high schools, as well as PhD factories.

One of my biggest gripes is how disfunctional our college system is, and how our Food Stamp President keeps throwing more money into it instead of shutting it down and starting all over.

Gee, my qualifications got me onto the faculty of two major US medical schools. I can’t be that defficient.

By the way, I got mine before US schools went downhill. You?

It’s rediculous to try to blame Carter for things happening so many years later. Subsequent administrations have had full opportunites to adjust and change things according to the conditions current with their administrations. Some chose wisely in how they did this. As time goes on, it looks more and more like Carter did. Some chose extremely unwisely, and got their bad consequences sooner. I don’t even need to name names on that one.

All the Presidents after Eisenhower have been total flops, but Carter started Fannie Mae and the CRA and Obama’s only recorded acts as an attorney were lobbying Pres. Clinton, Senator Dodd, and the Illinois State Senate to increase the number of CRA loans to non-qualified borrowers, and to increase the otherwise illegal commissions paid to ACORN for making toxic mortgage loans via commercial banks that would lose their banking licenses if they failed to make the toxic loans.

Don’t get me started on the incompetence of doctors and the failures of the US Medical Educational System.

How you can write “Some chose wisely in how they did this. As time goes on, it looks more and more like Carter did.” I can only assume you are one of the many medical persons who abuse the drug cabinet.

Once the floodgates were opened by Carter/Clinton/Obama, the corruption of immediate commissions for making bad loans that could be resold (without recourse or responsibility) under the implicit guarantee of the US Government enticed many bad actors into mortgage brokerage, both within commerical banks and in all manner of implausible entities.
Blaming one President is inaccurate: all are guilty, but Carter signed the CRA law, Clinton expanded it, and Bush never heard of it, let alone understood it.

As with most socio-economic trends, the disease grew for years before its mortal effects became visible.

Well, no, they haven’t all been total flops. Just the Republican ones. The others have quite good reputations in the world outside the US, whih does exist and is the source of even more valid (and more objective) opinions that the US has within itself like it or not.

When Carter signed the CRA, banks held their own mortgages and the associated risks. They didn’t hold onto them just long enough to pass them on like a game of hot-potato. Go ahead, accept my challenge of seeing which Presidents the bad loans were made under. I’d love that.

Sure, go on about the medical education system, as if you really know anything about it. The most you have is a few personal anecdotes. Let’s hear them, and I’m sure they’ll have nothing to do with the doctor’s education or medical knowledge, but what the heck.

Hey! Those Presidents have all been my Presidents as well. I AM a US citizen. What I am NOT is Communist. There is a huge HUGE difference between Euro-style socialism, which is the style of government of all the US’s first world allies (sorry) and Communism. Like you really think Brits and Germans and French and Spanish and Italians and Dutch etc. are communists. But if you think they’re socialists, you’re right.

And yes, it is acceptable. It is very acceptable. For one thing, when a second opinion is sought, either the diagnosis or the treatment is in question. For any given set of symptoms and test results, there is often more than one possible diagnosis. For any given diagnosis, there is almost always more than one option for treatment. That is just the way it is and will continue to be as long as medicine is advancing. It is even the truth that one medical institution gets better results with one treatment and another gets better results with another.

But seriously, if I understand your comment, if I am being receiving a treatment from one facility and am not getting good results, then I could go to another doctor and get the same treatment with a different result?

And if I go for a second opinion, then I might get another variety of treatment from a third facility.

And if that does not go well, perhaps a fourth facility could give the second treatment with different results than the third facility?

Is there a limit on the number of places/doctors I need to see/pay before I get cured? Or before I get killed?

Does the scientific principle of replicable results enter into this?

By the way, four doctors and four treatment/outcomes for the same medical condition/disease is not as unusual as anyone might think/fear!

The newspapers, golf clubs, condo associations, country clubs and the internet are full of histories that take many, many doctors before a cure is encountered.

It is not acceptable to dismiss such things as “that is the way it is” or as merely “anecdotal evidence.”

Actually, many doctors admit that three or more doctors may be required before finding the working/curing treatment for 15 to 20 percent of patients.

My own family’s “anecdotal” evidence consists of more than thirty doctors for four people covering 95 years, and includes three instances (for four people) where doctors insisted on immediate operations that were not necessary or appropriate. Did they teach the spelling of “malpractice” in your PhD thesis?

One doctor screamed at me at the top of his voice that if I did not let him operate on me tommorrow, I would die.

I refused and am living very happily. Another doctor cured the condition with antibiotics costing $47 compared to the $30,000 the surgeon wanted to waste, forget the pain, suffering, and risks of surgery, including the very real risk of infection in our filthy hospitals.

Our family declined all three operations, and lived very healthily without them, although it did take three doctors a bit longer to pay off their yachts.

I believe our medical schools, doctors, and medical boards are in need of even more drastic reform than our financial and governmental systems, all of which are so broken they cannot be fixed, but need to be totally discarded and reinvented.

Actually, you should, but I think that was probably sarcastic. By the way, I am not an MD, just a Ph.D. who taught medical students as faculty at a med school, so I treat no patients, just am pretty informed on how medical decisions get made.

No, what’s needed is a better scientific education for our people so they can understand what medical science can and can’t do.

Replicable results are one thing, but the facts are that the more we learn about the way the human body works, the more we understand why what we have considered one disease may be as many as 50 slightly different ones due to variations among humans. Every protein, and there are millions of different ones, varies from human to human. That’s why DNA identification works. We’re just at the beginning of understanding the significance of those differences, partly because the Bush administration has held the US back in genetic research. These variations can affect the metabolism of a drug treatment, and thus the actual blood level achieved by a given dose and how fast that level rises on administration and falls with metabolism. And on and on and on. Doctors do the best they can with the information they have, and yes, sometimes, like the rest of us, they have to try one thing and then another and even make mistakes.

As for replicable results, those also depend on many factors that we’re still learning to understand. For a long time all experiements were done using men to simplify matters and so as not to introduce variations due to women’s cycles. We’re discovering more and more that not only does the physiology of different sexes differ, but the physiology of different aged people, people with different ancestry, people with different upbringings, people with different diets and so on and so on.

It would be helpful, as opposed to verbiose, to suggest concreete, discreet steps toward improving medicine instead of “OMG there is so much!”

Back to the mortgage crisis” CCCCO (CuCoo Carter Clinton Obama) created the legal structure requiring banks to lose their license or make bad loans to Acorn/Obama. CCCCO worsened the stiuation by tellin banks “You won’t lose money because Fannie MAe will buy the crap from you and pawn it off on the rest of the world as Govies with AAA ratings.”

This malignancy fed upon itself. Country Wide, Citicgroup and all the others fell in love with making commissions and passing the risk off to the government.

It grew and grew and here we are with CCCCO banrupting us and our children.

And stop the Bush bashing. Yes he is stupid and failed to stop what CCCCO put in place but that cannot distract us from CCCCO created, leagalized, and forced it on the world.

1) Fund more biomedical reasearch and give all doctors free subscriptions to JAMA, Science, and Nature.

2) Do exactly what Obama is proposing and digitalizine medical records so that ALL the information regarding a particular patient is readily accessible by any doctor who needs it.

3) Extablish universal healthcare so that treatment will happen early on, when medical problems are most easily and cheaply treated, and so that people will be able to afford to take their complete prescriptions rather than halving them and such.

4) Adjust science education in American schools toward the UK model in which all science is taught in terms of its relevance to everyday life including its medical relevance.

The rest is just pure opinion and talking points swallowed without any evidence to support them. Provide some data and references to back up your points, and I’ll debate you. But pure statements of opinion without sources are not an argument.